The New Yorker Radio Hour - Kamala Harris’s Campaign Ends in a Fizzle

Episode Date: December 4, 2019

Senator Kamala Harris had a lot going for her campaign for the Democratic Presidential nomination: national name recognition, strong fund-raising, an association with Barack Obama, and a way of commanding the spotlight both on television and on Twitter. She promised to be the prosecutor who would bring Donald Trump to justice and a candidate who could take him on in the race, a combination that thrilled her supporters. But, on Tuesday, two months before voting begins in Iowa, she ended her campaign. What happened, and what does it reveal about the Presidential race? Eric Lach calls three New Yorker colleagues to debrief: Dana Goodyear, who reflects on her Profile of Harris from the promising early days of her campaign; Jelani Cobb, who talks about Harris’s standing with black voters; and Ben Wallace-Wells, who notes that the gap between the progressive and centrist wings of the Democratic Party may have grown too large for any candidate to straddle. Finally, Lach calls a heartbroken campaign volunteer, who estimates that she made thirteen thousand calls on Harris’s behalf.  New Yorker Radio Hour listeners, we want to hear from you.  We have a few questions about the show and how you listen to it. The survey takes about twenty minutes, and your feedback will help us make our podcast better.  Take the survey here.

This is a bonus episode of the New Yorker Radio Hour. Eric Latch writes and edits our news blog that's called The Current at New Yorker.com. Here's Eric. This is my question. How can a candidate, an up-and-coming Democratic star, a person capable of creating viral moments in a congressional hearing room and on Twitter, from a big-time state, a big-time fundraiser, capable of getting 20,000 people out to a rally and attracting, establishment party endorsements. How can that person walk away from the Democratic race for the presidency before the voting even begins?

What does that say about the race happening now and what are voters supposed to make of the choices left in front of them? Dana, hey, it's Eric Latch. Hi, how are you? I'm doing fine. Dana Goodyear is a staff writer who profiled Kamala Harris earlier this year. You spent time with Harris just as her campaign was in its sort of meteoric launch phase. Yeah.

You know, were you surprised to see it end the way it did? Surprised because she has mounted comebacks before in her political career, or she's come from very little and made a lot out of it. And she does have a reputation as a very smart street fighter in politics, which, you know, that's very much what San Francisco politicians are known for. and I know she has, as Gavin Newsom said, a lot of grit, and I thought she would stay in and maybe surprised people by some kind of miraculous comeback. I mean, she was doing well before that first Democratic debate, and then she really spiked after she attacked Biden. And then she was never

really able to reclaim that momentum, but I thought there would still be hope for it. But the way in which I was not surprised. It does have to do with California, which is that by the end of December, by I think the 26th of December, that was a deadline for taking her name off the ballot for the California primary that's March 3rd. So if she had her name on the ballot and she came in fourth, that would put her Senate career in jeopardy. So I think she cut her losses at close to the last. is a kind of embarrassing, like, home state loss? Home state loss. She needed to win California both to win the presidency, but also to stay in politics, I think.

And what happened, you know, it's a question that's sort of maybe best thought through the lens of California specifically. Like, what happened to her support even in her own backyard? Where did it go? To Warren and Buttigieg. But I think actually, you know, what I think that's where her. her donor support went, when it comes to polls about just, you know, what voters are likely to do from a very recent poll, the people who've been backing Kamala said that their second choice is Biden, which is interesting. So I think a lot of her potential voters may go toward Biden.

That is an interesting kind of way of analyzing how people ended up thinking about her as a centrist. And that, I think, speaks a little bit to some of the complexity of her campaign where people never really knew where to place her. And almost everything that was ever written about her involved something of the sort of inscrutability of who she was and how she would be. And you having sort of dug into it? I mean, did you see her, do you think that you saw her candidacy differently than, you know, just the average voter? I mean, what was that central message that she had, that she was presenting that the people weren't here and was there one? I think she probably less clear about that at the very beginning, let's say last January. What she had last January was Star Power.

And she does have that. I think what was uncomfortable for her was, or what the journey was for her, maybe from how, the way I saw it was, was feeling comfortable emphasizing her career as a person. prosecutor, because that resonated oddly in our present moment where there's a large and belated conversation happening around criminal justice reform. So I think she felt that she was part of that story of criminal justice reform, but a lot of people, a lot of activists to the left of her, and a lot of the media did not feel that she was a good representative of that narrative. Just never bought it. And I think possibly the fact that she's a woman and a woman of color made people even hold her to an even higher standard of, of quote unquote, wokeness than, you know, nobody really expects that from a Joe Biden.

And so what, you know, she's now, both her supporters are now going to be looking for who to support and, and she herself is going to become, you know, a prized endorsement or potential prize endorsement in this campaign. or what happens now to Harris in this campaign and to her supporters? Well, I'd advise if she ends up as somebody's running mate, because look how white the primary has become now. If you think about who's going to, at this moment, who's qualified for the next debate on December 19th in, ironically, in California, you know, right now there are... Six candidates all white.

Six candidates all white and two women left. And that, I think that raises her stock also. I think that, you know, it's not going to be a good look for the Democratic Party to have, you know, an all-white or all-male team on the ticket. Dana, thanks very much. You're very welcome. Thank you. Jelani Cobb is a professor of journalism at Columbia University and writes about politics for the New Yorker. So, Jalani, Kalma Harris was the second black woman.

woman ever elected the United States Senate, possibly the most prominent woman of color in the Democratic Party, what's the party going to miss without her in the race? Well, I mean, there's a lot substantively and then also symbolically. This is a party that really needs significant turnout from African Americans and Latinos in particular going into 2020. And so there's a question about whether or not the absence of a visible figure like Kamala Harris means that people will maybe be a little bit less motivated or a little bit less interested in what's going on with the party. There's the, there's the representation in terms of the leadership, and then there's the constituencies, you know, the people who vote. And one of Harris's arguments going into this race was that she was going to be able to turn out black voters. and to attract support from the black community,

like was she able to do that? How did that play out? I think there was a passive presumption on the part of a lot of people that figures like Harris or Corey Booker or the late entrant Deval Patrick might be able to revive what they were calling the Obama coalition.

And I think that it's important to look at that in a bigger context. Barack Obama receiving the tremendous, amount of support he got from African-American voters is very much the exception for black presidential candidates. Remember back to 2008, one of the more notable things was that Barack Obama did very well in South Carolina and ultimately won the South Carolina primary, but the surge in South Carolina happened, especially among African-American voters, happened after he'd won in Iowa, which was an overwhelmingly white electorate.

And so the kind of idea to black voters was this is not just a black candidate, it's not just a kind of vanity campaign. This is a person who actually has appealed to white voters and has a real chance of getting elected, so it might actually be reasonable to invest in this candidate. And I think the problem that figures like Cory Booker and more notably Kamala Harris have had is that they're standing in those earlier primaries has been kind of a break in terms of how much support they've gotten from African Americans. And Obama in that early stage that you're talking about, in many ways, was downplaying at first the historic nature of his candidacy. And, you know, Harris, especially in this campaign, you know, has wanted to, from the start, wanted to be much more explicit about talking about race, both in terms of issues of historical.

historical, you know, inequalities and impression and also about, you know, constituencies and who gets represented and who gets talked about. And maybe the biggest moment of her campaign was when she explicitly called out Joe Biden on the debate stage and said, you know, I want to speak on the matter of race. And I'm wondering, you know, what you make of that difference. I mean, Harris just seemed to want to make that historic aspect of her candidacy and these issues the forefront from the beginning. Yeah. I mean, I think there's probably two factors in there. one is the idea that they had already been a black presidency, so maybe there was a little bit more breathing room to talk about these things explicitly. And the other being that the existence of Donald Trump in the White House, much less the really vastly polarizing rhetoric that he tends to use,

has prompted people to say lots of things on the other side that they might not have said in a more tame political atmosphere. And so I think that just as a matter of responding, the level of incendiary rhetoric that we've seen in American politics now would lead itself to saying you can be more explicit about things like race. I don't think in the end of that's what hurt her, at least not what kind of did her candidacy in. Because if you remember, like going back to the Obama coalition part of it, the thing that really set his campaign apart was that super, superior, really superlative skill they had at grassroots organizing, which seems to have been a deficit here. Now, one of the other things is like it goes back to the old joke about music, which is that there are mistakes, and then there are the notes that actually sound bad. All the problems that we see with Kamala Harris' campaign, you know, allegedly infighting and differences about strategy and competition for kind of primacy. among her advisors.

Those things happen in most, if not all, political campaigns. It only matters if you don't win. If you don't win, those are the notes that sound bad. You know, if you make mistakes and you somehow another make it across the finish line, no one really thinks about those things in retrospect. And, you know, one of the things that she, it seemed like Harris spent much of the campaign, not really wanting to fight within the Democratic Party, but actually wanting to fight with the guy in the White House, Donald Trump.

And, you know, there was times during the debates where she would look straight into the camera and bait Trump. Like, you know, just, like it just seemed like she just really just all she wanted was for him to start tweeting about her. So you could, you know, they could get into a fight and the story could be her taking him on. And then just now, you know, yesterday after she dropped out, Trump tweets about her. And, you know, Harris immediately tweets back. you know, I'll see you in the Senate for your impeachment trial. I mean, this seems to be the fight that she was looking for. Like, how do you think a Trump versus Harris campaign would have gone?

You know, I mean, just the people who are interested in the pugilistic aspect of this, her dropping out is a tremendous disappointment because she is very sharp and she's very quick on her feet. And, you know, she seems to be the kind of person who in a debate, with just fillet a person like Donald Trump. One of the posts that she made was, you know, Donald Trump Jr. said something about her campaign being a joke, and she replied on social media saying, you wouldn't know a joke if you were raised by it,

which just, you know, you can almost practically hear people across the country going, ooh, you know, you said that. And so it really seems like she would have been a really serious candidate once it got to the general election. Jelani, thank you. Thank you. Ben? Hey, I was just sending you to your e-mails about the A.V. Klobuchar campaign. You're busy doing no work.

Ben Wallace-Wells is a staff writer who covers politics for the New Yorker. Let's go under the hood a little bit with the Harris campaign. Do you think, you know, one story that's going to likely get. told about her campaign is that there was a kind of policy ideological muddiness that hurt her, that she never kind of picked if she was going to appeal more to the left or to the moderates in the Democratic Party, that she walked back her support for Medicare for All, which is like one of the key issues at the center of this campaign. But how big of a role do you think that played? I think it mattered.

You know, another sort of element of policy that she sort of leaned on very early and then dropped was a kind of what she called the Lift Act, which was sort of a broad anti-poverty program. You know, not only was she sort of muddy in whether she was left or center, but she was also had a kind of complicated position around her own role in the race. You know, she sometimes talked about herself as a deliverer of truth, you know, a figure who would who would bring justice who wanted to, you know, to kind of reestablish the rule of law after Trump. But that was, if not at odds with, then at least intention with some of the kind of more expansive left-wing gestures that she made. You know, I think the truth about Kamala Harris is just that like the collapse of the campaign is over-determined. There are, you know, three or four or five reasons that it could have ended. You know, she failed to attract the supportive donors. She failed to attract, you know, much popular enthusiasm.

Her message, she seemed to be a somewhat different candidate, depending on what point in the race you encountered her. So let's step back a bit because I think, you know, Harris is maybe the most prominent, but is one of, a half dozen candidates who came into this campaign thinking that they were going to try to bridge the progressive left wing of the Democratic Party and the moderate or center sort of wing. Right. And it just didn't happen. And, you know, I'm wondering how you explain that. Like, is this split just, can nobody navigate this split?

the kind of policy regime that Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren wants to see enacted in which a lot of Democratic voters are behind. The difference between that policy agenda and even mode of politics that Joe Biden, Barack Obama was a more talented politician than anybody that's in. He also had a narrower gap to bridge between the left and moderate wings of the part of the image is not at all fixed. And, you know, it feels one thing that I think, with Harris wrapping out, you know, the field of possibilities is a few people. Ben, thanks. So just recently, I've been working on a project about campaign volunteers. These are the people who put in hours, days, weeks of knocking on doors and making phone calls and, you know, hosting people in their homes, campaign staff, all for no money just because they believe in the candidate.

And just this week, before Harris dropped out, her campaign put me in touch with a volunteer based in Des Moines named Brooke Black. Black started volunteering for Harris in April. And by her estimate, since June, she has made on average about 600 calls a week for the campaign, which if you do the numbers is somewhere around 13,000 calls total. So, Brooke, just tell me a bit about how you got involved in the Kamala Harris campaign. So I had decided from watching the Judiciary Committee where Kamala had questioned, Brett Kavanaugh and decided right at that moment that I was going to support her as a candidate if she ever ran for president. And once she made it official, I started reaching out to her campaign in Iowa, where I had just recently moved back to.

And I signed up, first of all, for supporter housing. And I've had somebody living at my house since April, three or four different people since then. Wow. And then it progressed from there. I started making phone calls Monday through Sunday and knocking on doors every Saturday and every Sunday with the exception of three separate weeks that I was out of town. Since when? Since June.

So, and how many phone calls, did you say you would, do you say you would, were doing a week? I was roughly doing around 600 phone calls a week and then canvassing Saturday two packets, Sunday two packets. And when you were calling people and knocking on doors, you know, tell us about the kinds of people you were talking to and the kinds of conversations you were having. Well, it was still very early on. So a lot of people were like, you know, I just want to see what goes on. I want to watch a couple of debates. I want to see how the canons interact. But a lot of times, you know, as we progressed further, I still maintain that they were just very undecided and trying to decide, okay, can a woman be elected? Can a woman of color be

elected? And I have said this countless times that if every single person that I talked to at the doors are on the phone said, I'm not sure if a woman can be elected would have thrown their support behind her solidly. She would be our next president. Yeah. I mean, as, I mean, can you think of an example of a time where you had that conversation in particular and how it went? Yeah, I talked to a woman at a door. She was just coming home and she said, you know,

I have two little girls. I want to see a woman be the president of the United States. And I absolutely love Kamala Harrison, thinks that she's a great candidate, but I'm not sure she could win. Why? Why wasn't she sure?

You know, she just said, because I don't know that we can elect a woman president. We've tried it in 2016. It didn't work. And, yeah, that was, my experience a lot, but also my experience were a lot of people that were supporting Kamala, and that was also very energizing and exciting to see.

And after putting in all this work in the months and having people in your home, how does it feel that the campaign is over now? It's emotional, absolutely. Everybody has put in a lot of hard work, especially Senator Harris, And to see what potential we could have or to see that we could actually have a woman as the president, a woman of color, is still very inspiring. And the campaign may be over, but the fight continues. And I just think I'm very grateful for the experience that I had and supporting the candidate that I truly believed would be the ex-president. Okay, Brooke, thanks so much for making the time for us. You're welcome. Thank you.

That's Eric Latch. He spoke with campaign volunteer Brooke Black and with Dana Goodyear, Jolani Cobb, and Ben Wallace Wells of The New Yorker. I'm David Remnick, and thanks for listening to the New Yorker Radio Hour.